A study conducted by the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Pennsylvania, on referral programs and customer value which followed the customer referral program of a German bank that paid customers 25 euros for bringing in a new customer, was released in July 2010.[5] According to Professor Van den Bulte, this is the First ever study published on the financial evaluation of customer referral programs.[6] The study found that referred customers were both more profitable and loyal than normal customers. Referred customers had a higher contribution margin, a higher retention rate and were more valuable in both the short and long run.[5]
In most ecommerce affiliate programs, less than 10 percent of affiliates drive 90 percent of conversions. When you partner with affiliates to market your brand, you learn more about your audience. Through evaluating your affiliates with affiliate tracking software, you gain insight into where your audience hangs out online and which affiliates have the largest impact. Having affiliates and having effective affiliates are two entirely different things, so you’ll want to monitor your traffic and conversion rates to determine if and when a shift is needed.
Conspicuous consumption is the practice of purchasing goods or services to publicly display wealth rather than to cover basic needs. Description: The word 'Conspicuous' here means lavish or wasteful spending. This kind of spending is generally made by people who have considerable amount of disposable income to spend on goods and services which are not necessary, but are more luxurious in nature.
There is debate on the origination and the popularization of the specific term viral marketing, though some of the earliest uses of the current term are attributed to the Harvard Business School graduate Tim Draper and faculty member Jeffrey Rayport. The term was later popularized by Rayport in the 1996 Fast Company article "The Virus of Marketing",[12] and Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail's practice of appending advertising to outgoing mail from their users.[13] An earlier attestation of the term is found in PC User magazine in 1989, but with a somewhat differing meaning.[14][15]
Social media platforms are built for communities. From individuals to businesses and government organizations, everyone use Facebook and Twitter to broadcast their messages in real-time. Social media channels are ideal for affiliate marketing efforts because they present your products to a large number of people. This is why it is essential that affiliate marketing professionals should work on expanding their social media footprint so that they could pitch their products to the world!
Messenger: Three specific types of messengers are required to ensure the transformation of an ordinary message into a viral one: market mavens, social hubs, and salespeople. Market mavens are individuals who are continuously 'on the pulse' of things (information specialists); they are usually among the first to get exposed to the message and who transmit it to their immediate social network. Social hubs are people with an exceptionally large number of social connections; they often know hundreds of different people and have the ability to serve as connectors or bridges between different subcultures. Salespeople might be needed who receive the message from the market maven, amplify it by making it more relevant and persuasive, and then transmit it to the social hub for further distribution. Market mavens may not be particularly convincing in transmitting the information.
C-Date is a major player in the casual dating industry working with affiliates worldwide. This campaign brings a little twist to the saturated online dating space. C-Date brings adults together to help them find new experiences and new styles of love where members’ most intimate fantasies become a reality. Casual dating is a new and growing phenomenon that brings a touch of class and respectability to “no strings” online liaisons. C-Date created and is the lead player in this new segment, and continues to see its popularity grow.
Web design is a very technical field that requires high literacy in many different kinds of software, including image editing and website architecture programs. A designer should be comfortable with computer “languages” like HTML and stay up to date on new technological developments. The designer is also an artist, so he or she should also have a firm grasp on aesthetics, visual continuity, and image composition.

When you use online video in your digital marketing strategy, you have the perfect opportunity to enhance your brand’s message and drive your company persona home. Through simple features like design and branding, to more advanced features like voice and content, video marketing is the ideal tool to strengthen your brand identity and make sure that your customers know who you are.

A 2016 Statista survey reveals that the largest segment of affiliates falls within the 25-54 range. 81.82% of all affiliates work on their side (or main, for some) income in the most active years of their lives. The biggest share, 31.86% are aged 35-44, while nearly 12% of all affiliate marketers are aged 55 and above. In all likelihood, these marketing platforms will see greater adoption rates among elderly, as the technically-savvy young and middle-aged users of today grow older.

Marketers aim to spread the word about their brand to a wide audience, and they often do this by trying to make their content go viral. Viral marketing is a technique, which marketers use intentionally to spread their message quickly. Just like a biological virus, a viral marketing campaign spreads from one person to another, resulting in a large number of views, substantial amount of social shares and remarkable brand awareness.

Prioritizing clicks refers to display click ads, although advantageous by being ‘simple, fast and inexpensive’ rates for display ads in 2016 is only 0.10 percent in the United States. This means one in a thousand click ads are relevant therefore having little effect. This displays that marketing companies should not just use click ads to evaluate the effectiveness of display advertisements (Whiteside, 2016).[42]
Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others. Few work as well as the simple Hotmail strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain all these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:
It’s important to know where your traffic is coming from and the demographics of your audience. This will allow you to customize your messaging so that you can provide the best affiliate product recommendations. You shouldn’t just focus on the vertical you’re in, but on the traffic sources and audience that’s visiting your site. Traffic sources may include organic, paid, social media, referral, display, email, or direct traffic. You can view traffic source data in Google Analytics to view things such as time on page, bounce rate, geo location, age, gender, time of day, devices (mobile vs. desktop), and more so that you can focus your effort on the highest converting traffic. This analytics data is crucial to making informed decisions, increasing your conversion rates, and making more affiliate sales.
There isn’t an exact formula to make your viral marketing campaign a success. In fact, going viral is one of the most difficult things for marketers. It isn’t possible to perfectly predict what can make or break a viral marketing campaign. However, the above tips should certainly be on your radar to improve engagement and increase your chances of becoming viral.
Content marketing: Writing articles or blog posts related to your business and submitting them to be published on other websites is another great way to reach your target market for free. Although mass distribution of a single article across the web doesn't have the same SEO benefits it once had, submitting exclusive articles to a specific site can still reap many rewards including SEO, boosting your credibility, and reaching a market that might not otherwise know about you. Because writing can be time-consuming, you may want to consider how you can repurpose what you write into other forms of content or with new angles for other audiences.
Viral marketing includes any strategy that encourages the individual to expand the marketing message to others, creating the potential for its exponential growth in terms of availability. Like viruses, such marketing strategies use an advantage of the fast multiplication to deliver the message to thousands or millions of people.
Viral marketing is often used in conjunction with other methods of marketing, such as in the case of the Blair Witch Project. The viral aspect of the campaign generated buzz about the story long before the release of commercials, trailers, posters, and other forms of traditional marketing. This caused many people to already talk about the movie before it was officially announced to the public.
Takes advantage of other resources. The most creative viral marketing plans use other resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on other websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on other web pages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or web page is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.
In the 2000s, with more and more Internet users and the birth of iPhone, customers started searching products and making decisions about their needs online first, instead of consulting a salesperson, which created a new problem for the marketing department of a company. In addition, a survey in 2000 in the United Kingdom found that most retailers had not registered their own domain address.[12] These problems made marketers find the digital ways for market development.
Becoming a part of an affiliate network is an excellent strategy for bloggers looking to up their current income or even just to begin actually making money from their blog. There are several options when it comes to affiliate marketing as well as strategies for making affiliate marketing work for you. Below I will teach you what is affiliate marketing, examples of affiliate marketing in blogging, affiliate strategies and some of the top affiliate networks to join.
Your affiliate partners will either receive a flat fee or percentage of each sale. Take a look at what your competition is doing and make sure your commission rates are competitive. The average affiliate percentage is somewhere between 5 and 30 percent, and it varies widely by vertical. Use your affiliate network to understand what is most competitive in your niche and what you can afford after you factor in your gross sales and cost of good sold (COGS). If you’re just starting an online business, you may want to offer a higher commission so that your brand is more attractive to potential affiliates. And you don’t have to stick to one commission rate. You can have multiple commission rates with different partners depending on how well they promote you and your current relationship.
Video advertising is becoming more and more affordable and widespread. Video adoption grows partly because advances in technology but also because it’s easy to spread across the globe. Making marketing videos for your business requires creativity and knowledge of human psychology. The cocktail of these components makes it possible to create real miracles of advertising at minimal cost.

It is increasingly advantageous for companies to use social media platforms to connect with their customers and create these dialogues and discussions. The potential reach of social media is indicated by the fact that in 2015, each month the Facebook app had more than 126 million average unique users and YouTube had over 97 million average unique users.[27]

Viral marketing is a customer-focused approach, so the first step is to identify the target demographic for a product and what they value the most in products, requiring marketers to research and analyze demographic data. During the Blair Witch campaign, the filmmakers and main marketing agents for the movie were accomplished film students. They examined what made horror movies compelling for the demographic of teens to young adults they were targeting, as well as explored how that demographic shared information. They used this information to focus on their product's mystery, and they concentrated their early efforts on the Internet where they knew they would have the best chance of reaching a younger audience. (See also Youth Marketing)
But as with everything, there are cons to go with the pros. While a good viral marketing campaign can bring massive awareness about your brand in a cost-effective manner, it also has the capability to dilute your brand. Or at its very worst, build negative buzz regarding your brand and products. This is when “too much of a good thing” may just hurt your work in building your organization’s credibility.
A successful referral program isn’t just about using your existing customers to gain new leads. With 74% of consumers identifying word-of-mouth as a key influencer in purchasing decisions and 92% of people ages 18 to 34 saying that they seek recommendations from friends and family before making a purchase, referral marketing is an integral component of today’s marketplace - and one that can yield impressive results if the right tactics are employed.
A truly viral product emerged from targeting a truly viral problem in the digital age, known as attention deficit disorder. Allowing people globally to channel their nervousness into an entertaining handheld device has allowed for the viral spread of Fidget Spinners. The products modest beginnings spread virally through school children and later through to adults. We started seeing fidget spinners in social media, memes with fidget spinners, fidget spinners distracting people while crossing the street, and of course, fidget spinners in the impulse purchase section of your local supermarket. This little product achieved a viral marketing status through providing a ‘solution’ to a viral problem and bringing about a world full of fidgetty temptation.
Now, more than ever, consumers are highly cautious about sharing their information – especially online. Make your customer referral program more attractive by being upfront and honest about the entire process. Let program members know how their information will be used, how they can keep track of the process and exactly what they’ll get in return. The more information you share about your program, the more at ease your customers will feel and the more likely they’ll be to sign on. And on the flip-side, collecting and analyzing data from customer referrals is critical for optimizing future rollouts and campaign iterations. You’re planning to enable your customers to share your brand with others, and in return, they’re going to enable you to better understand consumer behavior surrounding your products and services. The more you understand about your customer base and the leads they generate, the more efficiently you can hone marketing strategies, gain customer insight, and grow revenue. Don’t let this data slip away without tapping into its full potential. Before you launch a program, decide how you will collect, store, and examine the intel and data points you retrieve.
Best Practices Calls to Action Coding Content Marketing Copywriting Customer Journey Customer Spotlight Data-Driven Marketing Deliverability Digital Marketing Email Automation Email Design Email Development Email List Email Marketing Email Templates Event Marketing Marketing Automation Metrics Personalization Segmentation Social Media Strategy Subject Line Testing Transactional Email
More recently, companies have sought to merge their advertising messages into editorial content or valuable services. Examples include Red Bull's Red Bull Media House streaming Felix Baumgartner's jump from space online, Coca-Cola's online magazines, and Nike's free applications for performance tracking.[18] Advertisers are also embracing social media[22][23] and mobile advertising; mobile ad spending has grown 90% each year from 2010 to 2013.[24]:13
Conversion rate allows you to have a better understanding about the relative performance of each traffic source and landing page of your website: while it is important to focus on growing the number of incoming visitors, it is equally useful to try to get as much value per click as possible – both will contribute to your bottom line as an affiliate marketer. This also means that quick wins can be made without spending additional money on advertising or SEO:
My name is Jamie Spencer and I have spent the past 5 years building money making blogs. After growing tired of the 9-5, commuting and never seeing my family I decided that I wanted to make some changes and launched my first blog. Since then I have launched lots of successful niche blogs and after selling my survivalist blog I decided to teach other people how to do the same.
Affiliate marketing currently lacks industry standards for training and certification. There are some training courses and seminars that result in certifications; however, the acceptance of such certifications is mostly due to the reputation of the individual or company issuing the certification. Affiliate marketing is not commonly taught in universities, and only a few college instructors work with Internet marketers to introduce the subject to students majoring in marketing.[41]
All of our clients receive free access to our MarketingCloudFX software, the top ROI tracking technology platform in the industry. This all-in-one marketing automation software combines lead tracking, advanced visitor targeting, call tracking, automated email marketing, and more to help you maximize your spend, reach more customers, and earn more revenue online.
It’s simple: the more positive experiences the buyer reads, the more inclined they are to make a purchase. By adding your products to review and lifestyle affiliate sites, you‘ll be found organically for terms that they rank for, compete better with giants like Amazon, and will get more recommendations and exposure relatively quickly. Social proof is powerful:
In your affiliate marketing network, you’ll provide affiliates with text ads, banner ads, and content they need to promote you successfully. Most of your affiliate traffic will come from contextual text links in the body of the content an affiliate writes about your site. In your affiliate network, you get to choose which landing pages these text links go to, whether they be category pages, product pages, or simply the home page.
By creating information-dense, accessible, easy-to-interact-with video content, brands can develop a substantial online following and promote customer recall. For an example of a company that’s done this particularly well, consider Headspace, a meditation app that became a $250 million business. The app offers multiple levels of meditation, employing gamification to increase engagement. Users must complete and master each meditation level before advancing. Most sessions are in video format, beautifully crafted with illustrations and layouts true to the brand. It is elegant, consistent and engaging, heavily relying on video.
To achieve its goals, the team developed a video marketing strategy that incorporated its message across multiple formats to reach users at different touchpoints. It started with a YouTube Masthead ad, a format meant to reach a broad audience and start a conversation about the Pixel. Users who had seen the Masthead and visited the Pixel page on the Google Store were then served six-second and 15-second ads. Finally, for interested users who turned to search to learn more about the Pixel, the team ran search ads, which drove them back to the product site.

While these models have diminished in mature e-commerce and online advertising markets they are still prevalent in some more nascent industries. China is one example where Affiliate Marketing does not overtly resemble the same model in the West. With many affiliates being paid a flat "Cost Per Day" with some networks offering Cost Per Click or CPM.

Before you can create YouTube video ads as part of your marketing campaign, you must link your AdWords account to your YouTube account. Then you’ll need to import your video into AdWords - or create it if it doesn’t already exist. Once you upload the video, you’ll be able to choose a thumbnail and write some appealing ad text to encourage viewers to watch. The next step is to choose your target audience and budget. Provide some billing information, and you’re ready to run your first video ad.
Viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces websites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. A popular example of successful viral marketing is Hotmail, a company now owned by Microsoft, that promoted its services and its own advertisers' messages in every user's email notes.